# Unpacking the emotional drive: a grounded theory model of online collective action in social media

## TL;DR

This paper explores how emotions on social media drive collective actions, showing how feelings and social identity interact to spark large-scale online movements.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel grounded theory model centered on 'emotional drive' as a key mechanism in online collective action.

## Key findings

- Emotional contagion is a central catalyst for collective action, often triggered by a sense of relative deprivation.
- The model identifies five key categories: emotional contagion, trust dynamics, relative deprivation, social identity, and action constraints.
- The framework explains how individual and group emotions interact with social identity and constraints to propel collective action.

## Abstract

What are the underlying psychological motivations that drive online collective action? This study addresses this question by employing a constructivist grounded theory methodology to analyze over 300,000 words of textual data from 16 influential cases on Chinese social media. This study operationalizes “emotional drive” as the core dynamic process in online collective action wherein group emotions, triggered by an initial event and rapidly contagious and amplified via social media, interact with group social identity and external action constraints to nonlinearly propel collective action from emergence and diffusion to transformation. We developed a comprehensive theoretical model that identifies “emotional drive” as the core phenomenon, around which five primary categories revolve: emotional contagion, trust dynamics, relative deprivation, social identity, and action constraints. Our findings reveal that emotional contagion acts as the central catalyst, often sparked by a pervasive sense of relative deprivation among participants. This research provides a nuanced social-psychological framework for understanding how large-scale collective behaviors emerge from the interplay of individual cognition and group dynamics in digital environments. The model not only offers theoretical insights but also yields practical implications for the governance of online communities and the management of social dynamics in the digital age.